More Response To More Hate

I am delighted to hear that you uphold the doctrine of the Modification of Species, and defend my views. The support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail.

Charles Darwin, letter to William Thierry Preyer, March 31, 1868



This part of your imposing investigations being free from arbitrary opinions (which it is impossible to avoid in any treatise on the origin of mankind) is sure, I think, to extend and to confirm Darwinism in the scientific world. Besides Jena there is no University in Germany where your theory is so openly confessed and publicly taught by so many professors. Häckel, Gegenbaur, Dohrn, Strasburger, W. Müller, myself: we are true Darwinians, in our lectures and writings

William Preyer,  letter to C. Darwin  April 27, 1871

Try an experiment, google "University of Jena hotbed of Nazi ideology" and see how many times the words come up.

As to the current,  apparently blog-based myth that the Nazis banned Darwinism, that is totally contradicted by the fact that most of Ernst Haeckel's works - including those which Darwin, himself, said represented his thinking, most notably Die Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte  - were still being published in Nazi Germany right up to the end of the Nazi period.  Such eminent Nazi academics as Karl Astel, the Darwinist geneticist and rector at the University of Jena - just about all of the biologists, anthropologists, etc. in Germany who held their positions all during the Nazi period were Darwinists - was one of the founders of the Ernst Haeckel Society during the war, in 1941.  He and the co-founder of the society, Gerhard Heberer (both a conventional Darwinian biologist and an SS officer)  invited high placed Nazis to be honorary members of it.  One of those, Nazi Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel, wrote to Martin Bormann and Alfred Rosenberg to get their approval, which they gave.

That myth is a blatant lie which depends on the obscurity, in English, of the disproof of it but that barrier is going to be less useful to telling those are translated and publicized in English.  It also depends on the ignorance of historical and text-based scholarship by people who, somehow, get college credentials without ever learning how those work.  And, surprisingly, not all of them seem to come from the STEM subjects.  Though those who should know better might just be telling convenient lies.

More Ignorant Hate Over Berlin Diary

When we left off, yesterday, I'd pointed out that the book which was thrown at me, William Shirer's Berlin Diary, his diary kept from his experiences as a foreign correspondent in Europe, especially Germany, in the years of the rise of the Nazis up to the beginning of World War II in 1939 and the United States' involvement in that war too many months later.

As the point was the relation of Darwinism to the mass murders of the Nazis, though specifically, in the comments of the guy who trolls me with an obsession that has turned into a near daily attack on my character, the Holocaust, I'd noted that his own, chosen authority, Berlin Diary, a far from complete view of things, as it ends in 1941, Shirer noted what Germans thought were the motives of the Nazis.  You can see that at the Update in yesterday's post.  I could have made my case even more strongly by noting that Simel's own, alleged authority on the matter SAID THAT HE FOUND THE EUGENIC - THAT IS THE DARWINIAN - MOTIVE THE MOST PROBABLE.

The first motive is obviously absurd, since the death 
of 100,000 persons will not save much food for a nation 
of 80,000,000. Besides, there is no acute food shortage 
in Germany. The second motive is possible, though I 
doubt it. Poison gases may have been used in putting 
these unfortunates out of the way, but if so, the experi- 
mentation was only incidental. Many Germans I have 
talked to think that some new gas which disfigures the 
body has been used, and that this is the reason why the 
remains of the victims have been cremated. But I can 
get no real evidence of this. 

The third motive seems most likely to me. For years 
a group of radical Nazi sociologists who were instru- 
mental in putting through the Reich's sterilization laws 
have pressed for a national policy of eliminating the 
mentally unfit. They say they have disciples among 
many sociologists in other lands, and perhaps they have. 
Paragraph two of the form letter sent the relatives 
plainly bears the stamp of this sociological thinking: 
" In view of the nature of his serious, incurable ailment, 
his death, which saved him from a lifelong institutional 
sojourn, is to be regarded merely as a release." 

Some suggest a fourth motive. They say the Nazis 
calculate that for every three or four institutional cases, 
there must be one healthy German to look after them. 
This takes several thousand good Germans away from 
more profitable employment. If the insane are killed 
off, it is further argued by the Nazis, there will be 
plenty of hospital space for the war wounded should the 
war be prolonged and large casualties occur. 
It's a Nazi, messy business.

Far from me criticizing William Shirer's book for not noting the Darwinian connection to the murders of the Third Reich, he said he found that attributed motive the most probable of the three he said his German friends and acquaintances put forward as what led to the trial run for the Holocaust, the T-4 program.   

That policy was one that had its roots so far in Darwinism that it is found in the very book by Ernst Haeckel which Darwin endorsed in the highest of terms, Haeckel's German language elucidation of Darwinism, The History of Creation, which Darwin, himself, said was such a good representation of his thinking that if he'd known Haeckel was writing it, he wouldn't have bothered writing his own, second major book on the subject, The Descent of Man, in which Darwin, as well, endorses the idea that killing off those deemed unfit is salubrious for the surviving murderers and their descendants.  

I could also point out that the fourth motive was identical to that given by the next generation of Darwinists, such as H. G. Wells and those influenced by Darwinism, such as George Bernard Shaw whose Fabian speeches calling for mass gassing of the unfit was not entirely outside of the general line of Fabian and British thinking, a more efficient means of harrying the poor, the lame, the halt, the merely unfortunate out of an inconvenient existence. 

“A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.”

The comfort that English speaking people take in the absurd idea that Nazism is a strictly German language phenomenon is a lie,  Nazism, including the idea that mass murder was the way of nature and of a salubrious character, leading to both the biological advance of the survivors, the murderers and justified in some depraved form of economic utilitarianism was rampant among English speaking intellectuals at exactly the same time, finding its most popular form in Darwinism. If these people will insist on forcing me to note the depraved things their heros have said, things that put their thinking in the same line with that of such people as Himmler and Rudolf Hoess, that's not my fault.

Last night someone sent me a link to a Rawstory piece about some guy in Oklahoma who dressed up in a mock up of a Klan costume to protest "evolution" as being to blame for scientific racism and genocide - at least that's what I could gather from the piece, the guy's protest wasn't the most pellucid of messages.  The snarky presentation and the comments mocked the guy for his ignorance and superstition but, if I'd wanted to get into it, I'd have had to tell them that that guy was more accurate than they, in their college credentialed arrogance.  And I could give them chapter and verse of Darwin's own writing and that of his closest colleagues, supporting the idea of genocide against named groups, including Black People was not only beneficial but a biological imperative and a certainty.   If by "evolution" the guy had meant natural selection, that would be Darwinism, he was far more accurate than they were.   But his error, mistaking "evolution" for natural selection, that would be Darwinism, is common enough and something often, very often, made by even professional evolutionary biologists.  It's quite common among the latter day Darwinists who believe he unlocked the one, true mechanism of evolution.  Quaint as that idea should have become, by now. 

Hate Mail

Simps claimed that I slammed Berlin Diary for not blaming the Holocaust on Darwin?   I thought he was still pretending to have read the book.  The Holocaust hadn't happened when that book was written, though, as I had to point out to the moron before, Shirer did note that the genocide against the disabled had started by then and he talked about it.  If he'd really read the book instead of skimming parts of it and pretending he had, he'd have known that.  If he didn't before he certainly should have after I answered his previous misrepresentations of it.  And Shirer was hardly a major scholar of the Holocaust and what led to it.  He wasn't even a major scholar of the Third Reich, he was a journalist. Depending on him as an expert on the issue in 2017 doesn't even make it to the stage where I'd call someone a tyro, it makes them an ignorant idiot. 

The Eschaton commentariat are pretty stupid the ones who take Simps seriously, anyway.  

Update:  Oh, and from the book Stupy claims to have read, Berlin Diary, talking about those murders.


X, a German, told me yesterday that relatives are rushing to get their kin out of private asylums and out of the clutches of the authorities. He says the Gestapo is doing to death persons who are merely suffering temporary derangement or just plain nervous breakdown.  

What is still unclear to me is the motive for these murders.  Germans themselves advance three:
1. That they are being carried out to save food.

2. That they are done for the purpose of experimenting with new poison gases and death rays. 


3. That they are simply the result of the extreme Nazis deciding to carry out their eugenic and sociological ideas. 

Eugenics was a direct result, in both Britain and Germany of Darwin's theory of natural selection,  the inventor of the idea, Francis Galton and the people who are "credited" with beginning eugenics in Germany, Alfred Ploetz and Wilhelm Schallmeyer all attributed their eugenics to their study of Darwin.  I don't know if William Shirer knew that but it is irrefutable that all of them attributed their eugenics to Darwinism.  As I've pointed out any number of timesbefore, Darwin's own son, Leonard Darwin, attributed German, that would be Nazi eugenics to his father's influence as late as April 1939.  I'll point that out as many times as it takes to refute the lie that that isn't a fact. 

Trump, Russia, and the Facebook Factor

Dusan Bogdanovic - Sonata 2 - Now with the score

Jérémy Peret, Guitar

I've posted this recording of this sonata before but someone put it up with the score.  I love it when they do that, it's easier to hear more when you have the notes there, for some reason.  The penciled in analyses are helpful, too.

They Ignored Too Much To Write Their Articles - Neither Coates Nor Packer Considered Enough To Defeat Trumpism and Republican-fascism In The Future

I haven't been following the dispute between Ta-Nehisi Coates and George Packer very closely, though I had read Coates essay about the predominance of white racism over blue-collar class in the election of Donald Trump and how a concentration on blue-collar white resentment downplays the role of racism in Trump's election.  Of course Ta-Nehisi Coates is right, that racism is the predominant feature of this past election as it has been in Republican politics for decades.  It is the tool which Republicans have used to sucker poor whites into voting for people who make law and policy that is worse for them than Democratic policy all along.  It has been one of the main tools of American aristocrats to divide those they use and exploit since the colonial period, the American equivalent of the British class system which exploits racial identity as a tool to divide and conquer in a more racially diverse population.  That tactic couldn't work if poor white people weren't all too willing, in large numbers, to get played to weaken them against the economic interests they have in common with poor black people so as to benefit the aristocrats who exploit that self-assumed weakness.

None of that would work if a large percent, a majority of poor white people weren't disabled by their racism and that wouldn't persist to be the case, today, if they weren't encouraged in that racism by the media, movies, TV*, the internet, which encourage that racism.  I think that's among the most important things about this.

I read both Coates and Packer's response to Coates and noticed several things, they agree on a lot more than they disagree and both of them seem to ignore that none of the groups in question are uniform.  A large minority of all of the white income groups that Coates correctly noted voted for Trump, voted against him.  Obviously those people who voted against Trump were not persuaded by his appeals to racism.  There were people who voted for Trump who had voted for Barack Obama, what is up with that would seem to be an important consideration. especially if how they were appealed to in voting FOR Barack Obama could be repeated in future elections.  The difference between those who will never vote for a Barack Obama and those who can be won over by someone is the difference between who holds power and who doesn't.

The temptation among English speaking intellectuals to turn a majority of a group in some survey into a monolithic characterization of the entire group, ignoring that the very numbers they depend on don't say that would seem to be irresistible.  None of it is as easy as that, none of it is as easily turned into aphoristic, universal statements that look strong on the page but which aren't much use in producing political success.   A thin margin of white voters who voted the other way, white women, for example, of those who had voted for Barack Obama once or even twice but who either stayed home or voted for Trump, that kind of thing can make all the difference in an election.  And that's what we are talking about, who gets elected and who doesn't and why.

And I'm also struck at how little Hillary Clinton,  Donald Trump's opponent in the election figures in this discussion, her gender, her having been the object of a quarter of a century of lies and attacks from every establishment institution from the New York Times down to FOX, Sinclaire and the bottom of the septic tank entities such as are funded by the Kochs and the Mercers, and, as important to how she was not elected, The Nation and other allegedly lefty media, the Greens and, yes, the Bernie Sanders campaign, none of which I think can be easily or honestly characterized as either racist nor subject the the same character of economic aggrievement that is the subject of Packer's original piece.

Those were not negligible factors in how Donald Trump won.

Neither are the Constitutional features such as the Electoral College put in place by 18th century slave owners to enhance the power of racists in their time and which have not ever been removed even as their empowerment of racism and the economic elite worked just as was intended.   That those are deemed to be inviolate as they have worked to undermine and overturn progress against racism and inequality, certainly in every election in which the Electoral College was decisive putting Rutherford Hayes,  George W. Bush and now Donald Trump in the presidency** is a serious problem which is ever deferred to an ever fading later.

I don't find anything in general to disagree with in either Coates or Packer, though both of them have the same bad habits that lead them to over generalize.  I do think that Coates' point about the overwhelming role racism played as a tool of Trumpery, especially in so far as it was and has been the major tool of the wealthy to sucker poor whites into voting against their interest is likely the key to a larger understanding of how Trump got the presidency.  But I think that understanding is of secondary importance in how to change that and in doing that noting how Hillary Clinton was not able to do what Barack Obama did twice is of greater practical importance.  Did sexism play an even greater role in putting Trump in office?  I have no idea.  Would a woman who had not been subjected to a quarter of a century of character assassination by the New York Times and mainstream media have made this discussion never happen?  I don't think either Coates or Packer have included enough information in their articles to come to a useful understanding of these issues.  Maybe that can't be done but it should certainly be tried.

*  I read that last night's Emmy awards demonstrated that TV is far more "effortlessly diverse" than the Oscars repeatedly show that the movie industry is not.  I haven't thought much about that since I don't consume much of either, these days.  When I did pay attention to American TV it had gone from a very brief period when producers, directors and writers made a conscious effort to present positive images of black people peaking in the early 1970s to, as the backlash against that took over and, especially starting in the Reagan era, racial paranoia and fear became the predominant image presented.  I don't know the extent to which that may have changed in the past decade and more.

** Not to mention seriously weakening the one mildly anti-inequality president who managed to eke out becoming a president through it, John Quincy Adams.  At least one biographer I remember, pointed out that it was his experience of that election and his troubled one term-presidency was what radicalized him into becoming the great champion of abolition in his congressional career.  He'd been lukewarm about the issue before that, though, like his father, something of an opponent of slavery.

Bela Bartok - 27 Choruses for Womens or Childrens Voices Book 1

Spring

Don't Leave Me Here

Spell

Schola Hungarica ·
László Dobszay, conductor

I love this collection and think I'll post it book by book.  Unfortunately, I can't find an English translation online.  Bartok composed the music for folk poetry, the melodies are his.  He lamented that the difficulty of the texts for most non-Hungarians doomed the music to be relatively obscure, though he considered these some of his most important works. They sound quite rich for works that are all in two and three part textures.  

Johannes Brahms - 3 Intermezzi, Op. 117

Radu Lupu, piano

Score

Yeah, I Pretty Much Hate Harvard And The 37 Billion Dollar Pimps Who Run It - Hate Mail

I do have to say it is hilarious to me how many bold, iconoclastic, "free thinking" would be lefties go full Margaret Dumont if you call Harvard a whore house.  Or the other ivies or may-as-well-be-ivies, though not as much as when you note it's a lot more of a 37 billion dollar establishment knocking shop than a good to humanity.  Today Charles Pierce notes that in addition to canning probably the fourth least criminal candidates of that Kennedy School fellowship program while keeping the real thugs at the Kennedy School, Harvard's administration has the distinction of rejecting the recommendation of not one but two doctoral programs that they admit Michelle Jones as a PhD candidate because she is also a just released ex-convict, having served twenty years for murdering her 4 year old son while still a teenager.  Among those who support her academic career is the woman who successfully prosecuted her for that crime and who argued for the harshest sentence for her.  Diane Marger Moore said:

“Look, as a mother, I thought it was just an awful crime... But what Harvard did is highly inappropriate: I’m the prosecutor, not them. Michelle Jones served her time, and she served a long time, exactly what she deserved. A sentence is a sentence.”

While she was in prison, Michelle Jones made a vow to her son and herself that she would redeem her life and she did it by first educating herself in an inadequate prison library and then through earning a degree and making herself into what is, apparently, a fine historian whose work is valued by other historians, even, obviously, some of those at Harvard.  But, on finding out that she was on the verge of being accepted into either the History or American Studies PhD program, a couple of the profs there got the fantods and wrote to the friggin Dean and President of Whorevard and sandbagged her acceptance.  One of the excuses was they suspected she wouldn't be able to take the pressure at dear old Harvard, where she'd be subjected to those who believe they are, and these are their words, not mine, "the elite of the elite".  I've known a lot of Harvard products over the years, believe me, lots of them don't live up to that self-regarding phrase.  As I mentioned, one of them was the "Dumbest fucking guy"  Douglas Feith.  George W. Bush is another.  So is Jared Kushner.  

I mean, if the Great Gray Drab of the New York Times can see this as the disgusting cowardice that it is - one of the reasons they sandbagged Ms. Jones is because they were afraid of the right-wing media mocking them - it's really bad.  They deserve as much heat as they can get for all of these things.  If I ran the place, I'd get rid of the goddamned Kennedy School, altogether.  It's pretty vile.

I wish Ms. Jones all the luck in the world in her PhD program at New York University, I hope she produces valuable and widely read and influential history for decades to come, always telling the truth and always digging for deeper meanings behind them.  Congratulations to her department at New York University on getting such a promising candidate, I hope she does you proud.  For some reason this reminds me of how a few weeks back, after looking at a university anthology of then current poets, my guess was that Gwendolyn Brooks was probably read more than the much more lauded poets in it.  I mean, other than Ars Poetica as found in such anthologies, does anyone in the world read Archibald Macleish (Yale-Harvard) today?   I'm sure she (Wilson Junior College) will be for a long, long time.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Marcus Brigstocke - The Red

The Red 

Credits

Benedict Rufus Jones
His Father David Calder
Peter Marcus Brigstocke
Writer Marcus Brigstocke
Producer Caroline Raphael

What do you do when your late father was the kind of asshole who wanted his recovered alcoholic son to be tortured by his last wish?  Asshole.

Second Feature - Dylan Tighe & Séan Mac Erlain - Pulse Music / Ceol Cuisle

Pulse Music / Ceol Cuisle

A sonic journey into the thoughts and poetic imagination of the late West Limerick poet Michael Hartnett.Directed and Researched by Dylan Tighe

Original music and sound design by Seán Mac Erlaine

Featuring the all-munster cast of Actor, Andrew Bennett, Singers Nell Ní Chróinín, Iarla O'Lionaird, and the voice of Michael Hartnett/ Micháel O hAirtnéide.

Texts and quotations are by Michael Hartnett and are drawn from his poems and translations, the Michael Hartnett papers in The National Library, the RTÉ radio archive and from the Claddagh Records recording - "The Blink of an Eye"

Additional quotations were drawn from the diaries of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius.The writings of Michael Hartnett feature by Kind Permission of the Estate of Michael Hartnett and the Gallery Press - Special Thanks to Peter FallonAccess to the Michael Hartnett Papers is courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.Additional music is sampled from Camarón de la Isla - accompanied on guitar by Paco de Lucia, Elvis Presley, from Sibelius' 4th symphony, and from the track 'Nun's Island" from Seán Mac Erlaine's forthcoming album " A Slender Song" available from Ergodos Records.Special thanks to Jen Coppinger, Poetry Ireland and  Gabriel Rosenstock.Sound supervision by Richie Mc Cullough.

As always with plays from RTÉ you have to download it to hear it.

Corey Lewandowski and Sean Spicer Supporting The Shields That Say "Veritas"

Shield of the Kennedy School of Government At Harvard

Having, in recent days,  slammed the highly esteemed, often mistaken for liberal New York Times, the ACLU and other institutions of professional prostitution, I had intended the other day, to note, as the inestimable Charles Pierce, alluded, that that most august of establishment whore houses, Harvarad was .... well, here's how Pierce put it.

Among Massachusetts pols of a certain age—an age which I, alas, have finally attained—the John F. Kennedy School of Government is fondly referred to as Loser U, a reference to the institution’s regular habit of providing landing pads to politicians who lost their last election. The heart of Loser U is the Harvard Institute of Politics, which offers fellowships to various luminaries from the worlds of politics and journalism. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t have anyone in the shebeen looking up from their pints, but the IOP has made a real three-ring circus out of its fellowship program this time around.

First, it brought aboard both Joe and Mika, which has established in me a terror that I might run into one or both of them on the Red Line. I have had many interesting experiences on the T. Several of them involved loud disputes over Communist space aliens. That’s one I might rather avoid. But things got even more interesting over the past couple of months.

The roster of IOP fellows in 2017 includes Benghazi faker Jason Chaffetz, professional political thug Corey Lewandowski, professional bad liar Sean Spicer, and run-of-the-mill wingnuts Mary Katherine Ham and Guy Benson. (You should keep all these names in mind the next time you read conservative whinging about how oppressed they are. This is a nice gig here.) And, while I was contemplating what Lewandowski could possibly “impact” on students other than a seminar on how to go goon on female reporters, the really heavy shoe dropped.

They announced that Chelsea Manning would be joining these folks for the semester.

And, yes, there was hell to pay. From, with profound apologies, Fox News.

I'll save you the trouble of wondering, if you are, yeah, yesterday they canceled the Chelsea Manning invite, on the whining of the same CIA torture figure Charles Pierce mentions later in his piece.

Long, long ago, at my first blog I noted how the Kennedy School, in the authority of its Shorenstein Center had a habit of honoring media whores, some of whom had done a great deal to drive American journalism into having more of a character as a knocking shop than a public service, it's something Harvard, the Ivies and elite, especially private universities has done for a long time.  Elsewhere I'd noted that the man who General Thomas Franks said was "The dumbest fucking guy on the planet," Douglas Feith, after his entirely dishonorable role in regard to the illegal, disastrous and massively homicidal and entirely stupid invasion of Iraq in the Bush II regime, landed softly on Georgetown and Stanford and yes, Harvard's Kennedy School, though it is a tribute to the students and faculty at at least Stanford that their opposition got him canned from that one. And, of course, there are others such as Henry Kissinger who held faculty positions there when they should have been facing tribunals for war crimes and crimes against humanity.   Well, Feith is a Harvard product, "dumbest fucking" and all.  Oh, yes, and Georgetown, aka CIA U.

Harvard is a whore house, any academic institution that could give Jason Chaffetz and Corey Lewandowski those kinds of honors fairly announces its character as a knocking shop, for sale to those with money.   That the whore house that Harvard is, which has the word "Veritas" for its motto ) but which would have the Baghdad Bob of the quintessentially mendacious Trump regime, Sean Spicer on its list of fellows, not to forget Lewandowski, etc. is something that the most cynical of restoration and 18th century playwrights couldn't have matched.   Harvard is a whore house, the Kennedy School at Harvard, what with the Institute of Politics and the Shorenstein Center are cynical jokes, their slogans and mottos transformed by the actions of their members emblems of the decadent cynicism of an imperial system, which, with the current state of science and technology under the regime of modernist amorality might end up burning us all.

You'd have to be one of the dumbest fucking guys on the planet and a cynical asshole to think they were anything else.

Carla Bley - Potación de Guaya

Carla Bley, piano
Alan Sheppard, Sax,
Steve Swallow, bass


Update:  The Girl Who Cried Champagne

Fats Navarro Quartet - The Things We Did Last Summer

Fats Navarro (trumpet), Hank Jones (piano), Ray Brown (bass), Shelly Manne (drums)

Tadd Dameron Sextet with Fats Navarro - Lady Bird 

Fats Navarro (tp); Wardell Gray, Allen Eager (ts); Tadd Dameron (p); Curly Russell (b); Kenny Clarke (d)

"The Best Way To Prevent Hepatitis C is by avoiding behaviors that can spread the disease, especially injecting drugs."

Well, what do you expect when Simps takes parts of sentences out of context.  I can remember when there were regulars at Eschaton who noticed things like that, clearly that's a thing of the past.  But it was so long ago that the memory fades ever a little more

I don't have anything more to say. Heroin kills, so can unprotected anal sex, including anal or vaginal heterosexual sex with an infected person, for that matter, so can alcohol. Mix any two together and your chances of dying of liver disease increase even more.   That's not me saying it, it's virtually every public health agency which has spoken on risk factors for STDs, hepatitis and liver disease, including cancer.  For example, from the CDC, Hepatitis C information. 

Hepatitis C is a liver infection caused by the Hepatitis C virus (HCV). Hepatitis C is a blood-borne virus. Today, most people become infected with the Hepatitis C virus by sharing needles or other equipment to inject drugs. For some people, hepatitis C is a short-term illness but for 70%–85% of people who become infected with Hepatitis C, it becomes a long-term, chronic infection. Chronic Hepatitis C is a serious disease than can result in long-term health problems, even death. The majority of infected persons might not be aware of their infection because they are not clinically ill. There is no vaccine for Hepatitis C. The best way to prevent Hepatitis C is by avoiding behaviors that can spread the disease, especially injecting drugs.

Hepatitis B

In the United States, the most important routes of transmission are perinatal and sexual contact, either heterosexual or homosexual, with an infected person. Fecal-oral transmission does not appear to occur. However, transmission occurs among men who have sex with men, possibly via contamination from asymptomatic rectal mucosal lesions. In the past two decades, outbreaks of hepatitis B have occurred in long-term care facilities (e.g., assisted living facilities and nursing homes) as the result of lack of infection control practices related to blood glucose monitoring.

HIV infection: Prevention 

Today, more tools than ever are available to prevent HIV. In addition to abstinence, limiting your number of sexual partners, never sharing needles, and using condoms the right way every time you have sex, you may be able to take advantage of newer medicines such as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP).

If you are living with HIV, there are many actions you can take to prevent passing it to others. The most important is taking medicines to treat HIV (called antiretroviral therapy, or ART) the right way, every day. They can keep you healthy for many years and greatly reduce your chance of transmitting HIV to your partners.

I could go on.  Really, it was a real revelation how resistant the "reality community" was to the health information from the CDC when it conflicts with the most primitive of adolescent thinking about sex and drinking and drugs.  They may as well be their most benighted science-phobic ideological opponents, then.

Update:  I said the other day that Simp's biggest competition for biggest liar at Eschaton was Freki. He's OK with them using his blog for that, it's too much like work to have integrity. 

Arthur Sulzberger jr. And His Family Rag Brought Us To Trump

I just listened to a pirated Youtube of the Hillary Clinton interview done by Rachel Maddow and the first thing I have to say is, listen to the interview and compare her to Trump. Just think as you listen to her rational, informed, brilliance that this is the woman the American media sandbagged and lied about for a quarter of a century, leading to the installation of Donald Trump in the American presidency.  

The degeneracy of America, 2017 is directly attributable to the influence of the free press in the United States, perhaps most of all the Publisher, Editors, writers and even reporters for the New York Times, perhaps more than any other venue, the cabloid 24-7 "news" networks and hate-talk radio.  The lefty magazines, the tiny radio presence of things like Democracy Now and podcasts like The Young Turks have had a role in it but their destructive influence pales in comparison to the big, reputable media.

When people ask how the United States went bad, it was the media that made people stupider, that sold them lies that sold them bigotry and cynicism and paranoia and snobbery.   

Just listen to the interview with the woman who won the election but lost it through the repulsive and destructive Constitutional mechanism of the Electoral College, something embedded in the Constitution by the slave-holding faction, the non-slaveholders selling out to them in order to get commercial concessions that favored their own wealth.   Just consider that she is the second person who has had an election stolen from them by the Constitution in the past seventeen years, the Founders are directly responsible for both the George W. Bush presidency and now the Trump regime.  They are also responsible for the absurdly vague language that turned the ability of the New York Times and the rest of the media to corrupt a sufficient number of Americans into voting for Donald Trump over probably the most qualified person to have run for the presidency in the history of the office.  And now the same venues of media are telling her to shut up?   

To hell with the free press, their freedom to lie is what got us here.  Arthur Sulzberger jr and his rag did more than just about any other entity in American life to give us the Trump disaster.   He, personally, should take the blame on behalf of the media for which his family got the Supreme Court to give them a license to lie for their own purposes.   Someone, in one of the things I read in preparing this pointed out that Maureen Dowd got a goddamned Pulitzer Prize for writing her anti-Clinton crap.  The media, freed of having to stick to the facts have been destroying democracy for the past half century, it's only going to get worse.  Did anyone think it could get this bad back when Hillary Clinton was the embattled First Lady, under attack from the New York Times and everyone else?   And yet they have the gall to wonder how SHE lost the presidency to Trump? 

"what you've got to say about Grant Hart dying...." - Hate Mail

I never heard of Grant Hart before seeing your comment, I was vaguely aware that there was a band called Hüsker* Du but don't know if I was ever subjected to their music.  I'm sorry he died of liver cancer at the age of 56 but, really, that's as far as that can go.  I had a father and a brother who died of liver disease, it's a terrible death.  The thing you sent me noted he was a gay man with a heroin habit it says one of his bandmates had a serious alcoholism problem, my guess would be his cancer might have been a result of hepatitis caught from one or another of those frequent causes of that disease, though the obit didn't say that. 

I wonder, considering the character of the punk scene, are we supposed to have the kind of reverence for its recently deceased proponents you complain I don't have when I have never said I didn't.   It, somehow, doesn't seem to be in keeping, though as I rejected that anti-æsthetic pose from its start I'm very sorry to read about his passing and hope he did't suffer the horrible pain and suffering that disease leads to.  I'll give donations to Addiction prevention, Alcoholics Anonymous and or safe sex group today.  I'd think the best way to honor someone like that is to try to prevent the disease that killed them in other people by removing its avoidable causes. That's what I have to say to your challenge to address his death.   Did Simels put you up to this? 

*  I just wanted to find out if the wonderful EàsyType French Accents software I just downloaded would work on Blogger.  Finally, an easy way to type French accents that doesn't risk hand injury.  If you type French a lot it is great.  I will be buying it today.

I Know It's Hard To Keep Up But I Think Kris Kobach is the Trump Thug I'd Most Like To See Go Down The Fat Faced .... Well, What Samantha Bee Said

It’s Now Dawned on Trump: People Hate Him

Dusan Bogdanovic - Mysterious Habitats for Guitar

I believe it's the composer playing.

This reminds me a lot of some of the French variations over a ground, chaconnes, passacaglias,  from the baroque period.  Only it's definitely Bogdanovic's style.  He, Leo Brouwer, Atanas Ourkouzounov, it's one of the most important periods of guitar composition going on right now.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders Should Be Fired

What should be a fireable offense is for the presidential press hack to call for the firing of a journalist from the podium, as part of her official duties.   Sarah Huckabee Sanders should not be there because the line she crossed is a serious one and she went way, way over it. 

She's a blatant and serial liar, which should also be fireable offenses in a public spokesman, they should keep track and set a number when it becomes fireable.  She passed any reasonable number before she gets canned a long time ago.  She might even outdo Sean Spicer before long.